The Sun Newspaper today predictably hit back at accusations in it’s leader column stating, “If we cling to the fiction that IS have little or no support here we can not begin to grasp why so many alienated British youths are seduced by its extremism and murder and why so many more openly promote it”.
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The #1in5Muslims hashtag is being flooded with humour and pop culture references in reaction to the story, which has also received a record amount of more than 1,200 official complaints.
British Tabloid The Sun, came under severe criticism after running a front page story based on a poll according to which one in five British Muslims sympathizes with the actions of jihadis.
“The fact remains that a significant minority of Muslims have sympathy for the actions of extremists”, it said.
Many Brits who have travelled to Syria to fight have joined these other groups – not ISIS.
The list of critics now includes Survation, the company that the Sun commissioned to carry out the poll. On our screen, it was called the “Muslim Poll.’ At first, I thought it looked interesting”.
The biggest problem with the poll is that if you ask non-Muslims the same questions, they actually provide very similar responses.
Survation polled 1,000 people last week after calling people with “Muslim surnames” and checking their religion, says The Guardian, a method that “rival polling companies said did not necessarily amount to a representative sample of the British Muslim population”. It found 14 per cent of respondents had some “sympathy” for young Muslims leaving the U.K.to fight in Syria.
And six per cent blamed poverty and discrimination against Muslims for people going to Syria.
But Omar Elhamdoon, of the Muslim Association of Britain, said: “Those who do have sympathy have a warped understanding of what is happening out there”.
A video posted to YouTube on 13 November, the same day as the attacks in Paris, showed a man pushing a woman into the side of a moving train at Piccadilly Circus underground station in London. To take a more common example, a certain percentage of a particular party’s voters may hold a certain view.
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This month’s reported escalation in religious intolerance comes as far-right parties continue to gain support across the continent in the wake of attacks like those in Paris and amid public concern about the growing numbers of Syrians flooding into Europe in search of safety.
